Consumers suing Google over its Android operating system will need to present more facts if they want the case to move forward, a U.S. district judge said this week.

The tech giant was slapped with an antitrust lawsuit in May, which alleged that the company "illegally monopolized and financially and creatively stagnated" the U.S. Internet and mobile search market.

By pre-loading its own suite of appsfrom the Google Play store to YouTubeonto compatible devices, Google handicapped the market and forced competitors' gadget pricing to unnecessarily high levels, the suit alleges.

Now, Reuters reports that Judge Beth Labson Freeman suggested the plaintiffs' case may be too vague for the suit to continue.

"The speculative nature of the damages is really quite concerning to me," Freeman said, according to the news site. But she gave the plaintiffs an opportunity to revise their case with additional facts.

The class-action suit seeks damages for individuals who have purchased Android smartphones or tablets at what lawyers believe is an artificially high price due to Google's terms.

Google attorney John Schmidtlein argued in court on Thursday that the case should be dismissed, seeing as how the plaintiffs did not prove that smartphone manufacturers actually wanted to use a different search engineMicrosoft's Bing, for example.

The search titan, of course, would prefer that its Android partners preloaded Google apps on their devices, but they are not required to do so.

A January report from ABI Research found that while Android dominates the mobile OS space globally, there has been a sharp rise in the percentage of forked Android operating systems, particularly in China and India. About 25 percent of devices running Android are running versions that don't include Google's suite of apps.

Google's business practices have faced scrutiny in the U.S. and abroad. In the EU, investigators are still deciding how to proceed on separate probes relating to Google's search and mobile businesses.

About the Author

Stephanie joined PCMag in May 2012, moving to New York City from Frederick, Md., where she worked for four years as a multimedia reporter at the second-largest daily newspaper in Maryland. She interned at Baltimore magazine and graduated from Indiana University of Pennsylvania (in the town of Indiana, in the state of Pennsylvania) with a degree in ... See Full Bio

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